White Paper 1

Scholarly White Paper

Teach Black History through Historical Empathy to Combat Future Poverty

Renita Parks

Family and Community Relations for Teachers - ICL 7706

Professor B. Cross

February 24, 2018

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Teach Black History through Historical Empathy to Combat Future Poverty

This white paper uses the National Council for the Social Studies (2014) C3 framework as

a guide to explicitly teach historical empathy of black history to combat poverty. Students in

Memphis suffer from poverty and its harmful effects. I believe that education is key to a better

life. I also believe that if students have an opportunity to a critical education that allows true

social studies, lives will make more substantial changes, changes toward eradicating poverty.

Thornhill (2016) reports:

Familial racial socialization that Black students receive prior to and during high

school is uniquely related to their perceptions of, experience learning about, and

responses to African American history in their high school U.S. history courses. Those

students who received colorblind racial socialization in the household from their parents

and other family members were generally unable to discern inadequate and problematic

African American history. The absence of a critical interpretive framework through

which to evaluate what they were learning about African American history, and race and

racism more generally, resulted in many of these students uncritically assenting to what

they were learning about these topics (p.1148).

To the school board audience in the key area of Social Studies and Racial Literacy

education, I illustrate the need and benefits of American American History being more explicitly

taught in Memphis’ schools. Some students are unable to make quality lifelong connections to

materials taught in the past and even present social studies courses, therefore they are unable to

become empowered members of Memphis’ progressive society.

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“Not coincidentally, district and community leaders say, Memphis has the highest rate of

young adults who aren’t working or in college and the highest poverty rate among the nation’s

major metropolitan areas” (Kebede, 2018 p. 1). What is the problem? “The most fundamental

thing about a man is his outlook on life” (Bailey, 1935 p. 19). What is the outlook of this young

Memphis’ population that has finds life in continual states of poverty? How can educators help

students prevent cycles of poverty? These are broad wonders.

Wanda Rushing (2009) reports, “Memories and identities from the past and

self-consciousness, pride, shame, and ambivalence about identities give meanings and narrative

coherence to Memphis as a distinctive southern place and shape place identity” (p. 6).

As a teacher in Shelby County Schools, I am concerned. Kebede (2018) reports, “About

60 percent of students in Shelby County Schools live in poverty and all but three of the district’s

schools qualify for federal funding for schools serving high-poverty neighborhoods” (p. 1).

I became a teacher because I wanted to combat poverty through education. “Bachelard

(1994) describes school as one of the ‘sites of our intimate lives’ (p. 8), where children learn

about the world and learn about themselves” (Landa, 2012 p. 11). Poverty in Memphis affects

various races and ethnic groups, but it severely and continually impacts the lives of African

American in Memphis. As Dreer (1994) elucidated, “The trouble is this. Too much of our

training has come from the experiences of white people; too little has come from the experiences

of the Negro” (p.46).

Perrotta, and Bohan (2017) report that “ the C3 Framework is the most clearly articulated

recommendation of historical empathy in the social studies curriculum to date” (p.35). “The C3
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Framework’s emphasis on examining the perspectives and context of perspectives, as well as its

connection to ethics and moral education, highlights that great strides, albeit gradual, are

pointing towards a more explicit fostering of historical empathy as a curricular goal in social

studies education” (Perrotta & Bohan, 2017 p. 35). I would like to propose that Memphis schools

explicitly teach Black History using historical empathy as framework.

Perrotta, and Bohan (2017) define historical empathy as:

…Involving intellectual and affective dimensions of historical thinking that

“develop from the active engagement in thinking about particular people, events, and

situations in their context” (Davis, 2001, p. 3). According to Yilmaz (2007), historical

empathy “is the skill to re-enact the thought of a historical agent in one's mind or the

ability to view the world as it was seen by the people in the past without imposing today's

values on the past” (p. 331). Historical empathy is not the practice of simply pretending

to walk in someone else's shoes, but the process of 1) evaluating historical context and

significance, 2) identifying perspectives, and 3) making affective connections (Brooks,

2011).

Scholars use several terms to define historical empathy. The terms “perspective

recognition” (Barton & Levstik, 2004) and “perspective taking” (Davis, 2001; Duhlberg,

2002) have been used interchangeably to mean historical empathy. Endacott (2014) notes

that perspective recognition means identifying with a particular person's point of view,

versus perspective taking, which refers to the dialogue students engage in when

considering their perspectives, as well as others’ point of views.

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Landa 2015 reports, during Black History Month we ask our young Black students about

the struggles of their ancestors, “We seem to be asking them gracefully and serenely to accept the

past as fact, knowing that there is nothing they can do to deny the suffering of earlier days, while

simultaneously feeling a sense of pride in their heritage. Yet, how are African American children

able to separate themselves from the categorical identities of people they read about if we do not

invite them to talk, think, and explore their own lives and formulate their own identities? (p. 16)

Using the National Council for the Social Studies C3 Framework, schools should provide

time and opportunity to explicitly teach black history through history empathy to empower

students, creating a more positive outlook on life and therefore taking steps to combat future

poverty.

References

Bailey, J. A. (1935). Perspective in the teaching of Negro history. The Journal of Negro

History, 20(1), 19-26.

Bachelard, G. (1994). The poetics of space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Barton, K. C., & Levstik, L. S. (2004). Teaching history for the common good. Mahwah, New

Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

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Brooks, S. (2011). Historical empathy as perspective recognition and care in one secondary

social studies classroom. Theory and Research in Social Studies Education, 39(2),

166–202.

Davis, O. L., Jr. (2001). In pursuit of historical empathy. In O. L. Davis, E. A. Yeager, & S. J.

Foster (Eds.), Historical empathy and perspective taking in the social studies. Maryland:

Roman and Littlefield.

Dreer, H. (1934). The Education of the Negro with Respect to his Background. The Journal of

Negro History, 19(1), 45-52.

Duhlberg, N. (2002). Engaging in history: Empathy and perspective-talking in children's

historical thinking, New Orleans, L.A.: Annual meeting of the American Educational

Research Association (pp. 1–48).

Endacott, J. L. (2014). Negotiating the process of historical empathy. Theory and Research in

Social Studies Education, 42(1), 4–34.

Kebede, L.F. (2018 January 12) Memphis leaders say diversifying school business contracts

will help in the classroom, too. Retrieved from

https://tn.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2018/01/12/memphis-school-leaders-say-diversifying-bu

siness-contracts-will-help-in-the-classroom-too/
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King, L. J. (2016). Teaching black history as a racial literacy project. Race Ethnicity and

Education, 19(6), 1303-1318.

King, L. J. (2017). The status of black history in US schools and society. Social

Education, 81(1), 14-18.

Landa, M. H. (2012). Deconstructing Black History Month: Three African American Boys’

Exploration of Identity. Multicultural Perspectives, 14(1), 11-17.

National Council for the Social Studies. (2014). College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework

for Social Studies State Standards: Guidance for Enhancing the Rigor of K-12 Civics,

Economics, Geography, and History. National Council for the Social Studies.

Perrotta, K. A., & Bohan, C. H. (2017). More than a feeling: Tracing the progressive era origins

of historical empathy in the social studies curriculum, 1890–1940s. The Journal of Social

Studies Research.

Thornhill, T. E. (2016). Resistance and assent: How racial socialization shapes black students’

experience learning African American history in high school. Urban education, 51(9),

1126-1151.

Yilmaz, K. (2007). Historical empathy and its implications for classroom practices in schools.

The History Teacher, 40(3), 331–337.